"diesel engines are known for being especially difficult to start in cold."

When I was in the Army in Korea in 1985/86 one of the duties on the duty roster was to start every vehicle in the motor pool every 4 hours and run it for half an hour to keep it warm. Nothing like getting up at 0200 on a Sunday morning to spend an hour in the motor pool.

I'm growing to hate social media. This last week I've been using a browser plugin to just block facebook, twitter and instagram due to the fact its just a sea of people hating and accusing each other of psychotic bullshit over the CK murder and like...... get a fucking grip americans.... Its just bad for the soul to be flooded with hyper partison aggravated political bullshit all day. So I've blocked it, and despite my inner idiot wanting to get on there and yell at people, I'll take the dopamine loss and just do something else. Like play the piano, or run the storyline on that new Dune Awakening expansion. Or go and drink rum with friends. Or fucking anything other than doomscroll on facebook again.

If AI kills social media , then maybe AI might just be good for something.

Some experiments show that light doesn't exist unless we look at it.

No experiments show that. Its just a strange interpretation of certain features of photons. But to be clear that doesnt mean "the photon is not real", rather it shows probabilistic properties under specific circumstances. Strange does not mean fake.

as for whether it 'experiences' time. Well thats a complex question. Due to time dilation , from *its* inertial frame, one would things happen pretty much instantly, it is effectively always at the end of its own time cone. But from an observers inertial frame, it would be travelling at precisely the speed of light (in a vacuum).

These are, I should note, entirely different things, and it would muddy the mind to mix these two ideas together.

One day we will learn in school that empathy is bad. An out of date emotion that was only useful when we were a grazing herd.

Spoken like a true sociopath.

Without empathy we dont have society. Without empathy we don't have morality. Without empathy were little more than apes dashing each others brains out with rocks over territory.

What a stupid claim. Evolution gave us the mirror neuron for a goddamn reason.

Sometimes it's not even for cost cutting.

E.g. I mean yeah, I get it; you're in marketing/"creative", so your converted-into-an office house in a bad neighborhood downtown is very cool and hip. Yet for some reason, some of your employees just still don't want to go there physically every day.

... despite a full court press to get everyone back in the office physically, they've managed ... a little over half?

Riddle me this.

Why is Visual Basic still up there?

Is VBA still a BIG thing? I guessed it was still a thing but disappearing down its own DIM statement.

Or Visual Basic, part of Visual Studio? ... just why?

"Python is one of the worst offenders when it comes to breaking changes"

Eh? the 2 -> 3 transition was well over a decade ago dude, and the API stability of python libraries has always been one of its selling points. Considering its rivals like JS and its never ending library updatge hell, thats a weird claim to make

Why have one authoritarian country have all the AI when 3 authoritarian countries can have all the AI.

(Sorry americans, but right now I'm counting you guys as an authoritarian country. With that said, if you guys arent using that constitution anymore, can we have it? )

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

One of my more bonkers moves as a 20something in the 1990s was busting a girlfriend out of a mental ward she was being held involventarily in. she was actually fine , but some asshole psych had her basically captive because apparently not complying with her turbo christian parents is madness.

So after an afternoon at the pub, me and a bunch of the boys just barged in and walked her out the front door with the "We are bigger and scarier and you have no power over us" glare.

The wild thing is ..... it worked. The cops didnt come for her, and to this day 30 years later she's never heard a thing from the ward. I've long suspected there was something very wrong going on in that hospital and they decided it better to just let her go than have the cops involved.

Thats usually where these sorts of accidents happen in my experience. I ride an escooter, and here in australia the speed limits 25km/h on an escooter. Thats a pretty good limit. At 25km/h most crashes are just ouchies. Scratches, bruises, but rarely anything more serious than that unless you collide with a car or human. If the cops catch you with a scooter going faster, they can confiscate it and under anti hooligan laws (originally designed to go after illegal drag racers) can confiscate and destroy the scooter. I think thats entirely reasonable. Break the law, get the penalty. cause -> effect.

The problem is all the scooter stops advertise these ridiculously souped up scooters that let you switch off the govenors and can get upwards of 70km/h. Even 35kmh your starting into broken bones territory. Get thrown face first over the handlebars at 70km/h, you'll be lucky if you come out of that a tetraplegic.

These vehicles are great. I spend less per year on electricity to run it than most electric cars will spend in a weekend. Its as close to carbon zero as you'll get without going full fred-flinstone and just relying on feet power. But these dickhead shops selling people 70km/h scooters with the govenors disabled and not teaching people even the basics in how to ride safely and road rules, its gonna get the whole damn lot banned.

I did some work not too different than this when I was working for myself. That was early aughts, so instead of vibe coders we had small business owners trying to do things beyond their competence in Excel and Access and such.

I far preferred other clients - almost by definition, these people are cheap, and the sorts of asks they could come up with could be utterly absurd. ("No, I cannot build you an eBay replacement with built-in voice calling for $500.") But sometimes you can't be picky.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

Should governments be able to regulate those awful tech bros however they want to, or should we have the ability to choose digital privacy if we want?

The Slash-geist seems to lurch dramatically between the two ...